Rock Band [Bryan]

An interesting critique of Rock Band and Guitar Hero from the music critic of the New Republic. Interesting because, well, who among us has not been fascinated by pretending to a rock star in these games for a few moments?

Granted, I think the author needs to relax a bit. But two criticisms that are raised seem about right to me. First:

What’s troubling about Guitar Hero and Rock Band is not the presence of competition in the context of music, but the terms of that competition: the values--or more accurately, the non-values--the games promote. The games measure performance almost entirely by two standards: speed and flash (accomplished by use of a whammy bar on the play guitars). The more notes you hit on the games’ buttons and the more rapidly you hit them, the higher your score, the richer you get, and the more girls who thrust their gargantuan digital breasts your way. The imaginative power of the notes or the chords underneath them matter little; what counts most is the notes’ quantity and speed. The music best suited to these games--the outrageously stupid big-hair arena metal that Spinal Tap first parodied twenty-five years ago--is and always has been blandly hyperactive and formulaic. It is music as grotesque as the games’ porny electronic girls in the indiscriminate robot frenzy they are programmed, like Rock Band players, to enact.

Second, is the author's brutal but accurate take down of so-called Classic Rock, the most overrated genre of music since twelve-tone serialism.

For another thing--and this is the main failing of music games, and it is a significant one--they have the insidious effect of glorifying classic rock, a music with an already bloated reputation that is founded on its very bloatedness. In the games’ absorption with technical prowess, speed, flash, grandiose show, and fakery, they not only affirm the enduring allure of classic rock to kids and young adults, especially males; they also advance its tyranny. People like me who have kids of video-game-playing age no doubt get many things wrong about these games, and chief among the errors of our age group, I think, is inflated generational pride in the 1970s-style arena rock that Guitar Hero and Rock Band promote to our descendants--kids who might otherwise, and perhaps more appropriately, use their after-school hours to nurture interests in music of their own. The games reassure us that our aftercomers are our heirs.